Cool evolution stuff!!

I don't know if anyone still is here, but this is really cool! Check it out!

3 Incredible Examples of Evolution Hidden In Your Body

Stem Cells in Teeth

Here's a link to an article in Science about how they found nerve cells inside adult teeth that are able to revert back into stem cells!

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/unexpected-stem-cell-factories-found-inside-teeth

Glowing Fungi Forest in Japan

There are roughly 80 species of bioluminescent fungi in the world. Just like a flower that only produces a scent at night in order to attract nocturnal pollinators, such as a moth, these fungi produce their light in order to attract spore-spreading bugs. Even more curious, these fungi use an enzyme to produce luminescence that is similar to that in fire flies and angler fish, oxyluciferin. However, they have found that the fungi's enzymes are, what they call, "promiscuous," meaning that they can produce a variety of different colors just by adding different compounds to the same luminescent enzyme.
There is a forest in Shikoku, Japan that is full of these species of fungi. Just somewhere to add to your bucket list.

Came across this NPR article about African baobab trees starting to die off at faster rates (people think that it's due to climate change) :( I think these trees were included in lecture last quarter! The article also mentions some obstacles researchers face when trying to determine a baobab tree's age...

Convergent Evolution of Consciousness (Octopi)

Octopi are the only non-vertebrate animals to be protected by the Animal (Scientific Procedure) Act. This is due to their apparent possession of a rudimentary level of consciousness. Octopi are notorious for their stubbornness as lab participants. They are known to squirt water at the experimenters, repeatedly short circuit the lights above their tanks, escape, and even sabotage equipment. They have been observed in developing preferences for certain people over others even when the two in question are dressed identically. They can use tools, communicate, and learn through observing others. Octopi brains are lateralized, like mammalian brains, but the majority of their 500 million neurons are spread throughout their body and arms, giving the arms almost a mind of their own. A search for mirror neurons in octopi has also begun. If found, it would mean that octopi may be able to infer the emotional states of another animal just like we do.

 Many who meet these creatures say that they walk away feeling as though they had encountered another mind or consciousness. However, the last common ancestor or humans and octopi was roughly 600 mya, and accordingly, their brains are much different than ours. Considering this, we cannot explain our application of sentience to octopi to a shared history or kinship with them. We cannot assume that human consciousness erupted, fully-formed. It developed and grew more complex just as other traits did. Some scientists are searching for this origin of the mind and consciousness and attempting to trail it back to the awareness we possess today. Could octopi be in these beginning stages that they are looking for? But from a convergent evolutionary trajectory. Evolution managed to build minds twice over. Who is to say it could not inspire consciousness twice as well?

Like the flight of birds versus bats, the consciousness found in octopi and humans, may be alike in function but morphologically different. The separation of the octopi’s neurons into its body seemingly gives its arms minds of their own. When placed in an unknown tank with food in the center, it is common for some of the octopus’ arms reach toward the food, others toward corners and safety, and others, still, explore independently, creating a sort of tug of war within the body itself. One could speculate that octopi in the early stage of developing a new type of “sense of self,” one where consciousness and motive is distributed throughout the body instead of unified as it is in humans. Despite the ecological and strategical barriers, could octopi on their way to becoming the next big sentient being on the planet? And what will we do if they succeed?... just a question.

Molecular clues for synesthesia

Synesthesia: when the stimulation of a sense causes an additional sensation. For instance, hearing a sound causes someone to see a color, or a shape.

Researchers have found three families who experience synesthesia are connected by a rare variation of genes that contribute to a process known as axonogenesis, a process that is crucial to establish neuronal connections in the brain. There is still more research being done on it, but imagine that. Groups of people (families) all connected by a gene that allows them to experience this phenomena. Something to sit and wonder about.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180305150549.htm
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/12/3168

Reversing the effects of dementia (in mice)

Very recently, scientists have found a way to reverse some of the effects of dementia in mice -- with a drug, Zileuton.

Building off of previous studies that showed the dangers of leukotrienes, a compound that attempts to protect nerve cells but doesn't necessarily do a good job at it, researchers considered whether blocking such compounds could possibly reverse the damage and "fix memory" in mice that already allocated tau pathology (distinguished by "neurofibrillary tangles" and "disrupted synapses"). They blocked it by using Zileuton, a drug that obstructs the production of leukotriene by blocking a certain enzyme.

They conducted a study in which they treated tau transgenic mice with zileuton at 12 months old (60 in human years!). After 16 weeks, they found that the mice that had been treated performed better than mice that hadn't been, demonstrating the reversal of "memory deficiency".

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180608101905.htm

Phillip F. Giannopoulos, Jian Chiu, Domenico Pratic. Learning Impairments, Memory Deficits, and Neuropathology in Aged Tau Transgenic Mice Are Dependent on Leukotrienes Biosynthesis: Role of the cdk5 Kinase Pathway. Molecular Neurobiology, 2018; DOI: 10.1007/s12035-018-1124-7

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12035-018-1124-7

"sex" chromosomes

In 2010, Dr. Paul James sat down to have one of the strangest conversations he's ever had with a patient. As a clinical geneticist, he's always asked to screen baby's chromosomes for abnormalities, but he found some unseen abnormalities in the parent instead.

In this conversation, a pregnant woman discovered that half of her body was chromosomally male. What did this mean for her sex? Well, nothing really. She is still a woman.

But what does this mean for science? Sex is a lot more complex than we thought. We knew that all along, since we began to define intersex identities, where a person's sexual anatomy does not coincide with their "sex" chromosomes".

And what does "sex chromosomes" mean anyways? We used to consider the feminine XX to be the default for all fetuses, with the SRY gene on the Y chromosome determining testes development. But the "default" was disproven by the discovery of the WNT4.XY, a gene that promotes ovarian development and suppresses testicular development. When this gene is present, the fetus is female, and extra copies can cause abnormalities in the genitals.

Interesting research that has been done with SRY genes includes a study done on mice in which scientists discovered that keeping their ovaries was a life long process. They found that FOXL2 is a transcriptional factor that prevents "transdifferentiation of an adult ovary to a testis". When this factor was deleted, the levels of testosterone in the mice were similar to normal XY mice.

https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

mice study

Ectotherms give themselves fevers

A couple weeks ago, someone asked whether or not ectotherms are able to get fevers as a way to fight off infection. I found a really interesting BBC article that confirms that ectotherms do get fevers, but they are not created internally. Studies show that when infected with a virus or bacteria, many ectotherms will prefer a warmer environment. The warmer environment can raise their body temperature above normal, creating a fever, to help fend off an infection. This phenomena is called behavioral fever and can be life saving for a diseased individual.

To learn more, check out the article:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170608-why-some-cold-blooded-animals-can-get-a-fever

Adult-onset allergies

I love eating fruit. If I suddenly developed an allergic reaction to certain types of fruit, that'd be super not-great. I have a friend who suddenly developed an allergic reaction to cherries as a teenager! 

Adult-onset allergies are food allergies that arise when an individual is in adulthood. The immune system mistakenly identifies the food as harmful. Here's a fun YouTube video that explains allergic reactions. 

Apparently being exposed to the food is a potential way to reverse the allergic reaction. As allergy prevalence seems to be increasing, more people are concerned about preventing/reversing food allergies. This made me wonder if immuno-compromised  individuals still experience allergic reactions. Here is a 2006 Pediatrics paper that shows that the immune system of immunosuppressed individuals (for an organ transplant) still responded to allergies... 

C. Elegans Connectome

So related to the nervous system of animals is the connectome of C. elegans, a complete diagram of how every neuron in an individual worm connects to one another. C. elegans is the only organism with a complete connectome, and it provides a foundation for researchers to build upon. Here is awesome stuff about it and I am sure you can look up other articles too.

Here is a 3D diagram of the C. elegans connectome:


Here is an article discussing the connectome and its use in research:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-connectome/

Here is a video of a robot that operates with the C. elegans connectome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQnzylhgHc

The video and robot itself are pretty boring, but remember that the worm's nervous system is pretty simple, with about only 300 neurons, so worm behavior is also pretty simple (they really just wiggle around). And that this robot has not been programmed with these movements; it is learning. The connectome is like a form of artificial intelligence, basically the robot has the worm's "brain". That wording is probably inaccurate, but I do not know a lot about computer science or artificial intelligence, just that robot with worm nervous system=awesome.

Ocean warming associated with increased human infections

I read this interesting study entitled Climate influence on Vibrio and associated human diseases during the past half-century in the coastal North Atlantic. Here's a summary of the paper, feel free to look it up and read more!

 Intro 

 In this study, researchers used the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) archive, a long term survey of phytoplankton and zoo plankton. With the archive, they were able to analyze the DNA of plankton over a span of 50 years to find the relative abundance of vibrio bacteria in nine different locations that have undergone rapid warming.

 What are vibrio? 

 Vibrio are marine picoplankton, there are more than 110 recognized species, many are known human and animal pathogens. Cholera is caused by the pathogen Vibrio cholerae, Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Vibrio vulnificus infections are associated with high mortality worldwide, and V.cholerae O1 and V. parahaemolyticusserotype O3:K6 have been responsible for two of the most significant bacterial pandemics.
The issue: Recent data have shown that Vibrio-associated illnesses are increasing worldwide!

 Results

 Researchers found a positive correlation between the relative abundance of vibrio and sea surface temperature. Next, they crossed this data with epidemiological studies on Vibrio-related infections and found that over the past 50 years there has been an increase in Vibrio related human infection that mirrors the increase in Vibrios in the ocean.

How to Hijack a Cockroach's Nervous System

Researchers were able to stimulate a cockroach's motor neurons (inducing it to kick its leg) and interpret impulses from sensory neurons (differentiate between different braille characters that the roach is in contact with) with an "electronic nerve network" of electric currents.

I think this is pretty cool, especially considering how society has a tendency to treat the brain as this mystical unknown thing capable of immense power; but at the end of the day, it's just a mechanism like anything else in the body. The brain just happens to be a mechanism that we know a bit less about than the others. But, this experiment is certainly a step forward.

Here's the link to the article in case y'all wanna check it out:  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05322-7

Matrix of Neurons in our Intestine: "Second Brain"

We spoke about neurons the other day and physiology so I thought this was a relevant but kind of weird article! Basically, this article talks about the "intestinal brain" which is a matrix of millions of neurons that control our large intestine and colon independently without any direction from the brain. Studies of this matrix have shown that this neuronal network actually mirrors the brain in early stages of its development. They've actually hypothesized that this system evolved before our central nervous system did, meaning it is the earliest functioning brain in our body... which is actually a pretty interesting takeaway from the article. There's more places you can link out to from this article if you're interested and want to learn more!

https://www.livescience.com/62683-colon-brain-neuron-firing-pattern-detected.html

What do fungi enjoy around a campfire? S’pores!

If you think back ages ago, the first week of spring quarter, you might remember the very first topic we covered- fungi.

Since then, because I'm a weirdo, I've sorta kept an eye out for mushrooms on campus. And by "sorta kept an eye out," I mean go completely out of my way to walk through places where I might find some. (And I did btw... I took pictures but I'm too lazy to add them.)

Now, I've always thought they were really cool, and because I subscribe to many different science channels, I am quite exposed to cool things about them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

We talked about truffles and how expensive they were, but did you know that the most expensive fungus in the world is actually a parasitic fungus that certain economies depend on? 

Here's a video from Gross Science: The World's Most Expensive Fungus

That is a fungus belonging to the genus Ophiocordyceps. You may have heard of another famous fungi that mind controls it's victims in ants, leading them to their doom.

There's actually a really good book (and movie I think) that takes this concept and runs with it. It's called The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey. You can buy it here. The star of the show, if I remember clearly, a fictional (don't freak) fungus of the same genus.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Speaking of fungal assassins, Fusarium Oxysporum was a superninja fungus that humans were helpless against that wiped out all of the Gros Michel bananas and nearly all bananas we had. 

Hank explains this in the video: The Terrifying Truth About Bananas

BUT there's bad news... A new fungal assassin has emerged and it's next target is the banana we have today. 

Another scishow video: Bananas Are Losing the War on Fungus

--------------------------------------------------------------------

But do fungal assassins only target bananas? Hell no! They're after frogs too! 

I kinda gave it away but here's yet another scishow video: What's Killing the World's Amphibians?

--------------------------------------------------------------------

BUT WAIT! Not all fungal assassins come in the form of specialized killers. Some are just deadly monsters that are ready to kill anything that messes with it. The Death Cap is a quiet inconspicuous mushroom spreading in Northern California.

*If you watch only a single video from this post, please watch this one!!!* 

Deep Look: This Mushroom Starts Killing You Before You Even Realize It

mini rave: Deep Look is amazing! They have super high definition and awesome narration! And they even make music specific to each video that fits wonderfully!!! I look forward to every single post!

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't let these guys give fungi a bad rep though. Some fungi bring death, while others make life possible.

Forests plants need them to communicate with each other using a fungal internet that is referred to as the "Wood Wide Web." 

They even allowed for the succession of life on land! I think I've shared this video already (it's a cool one) but just in case I haven't here it is: When Giant Fungi Ruled 

If you haven't heard of the concept of the "Great Filter" then click the link! Personally, I think fungi play a key role in the development of life. It might be what sets us apart! :) 

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I didn't cover everything, but this video does a pretty good job at bringing up all the points I've made and more: 10 Fantastic Fungi Superpowers 

(That first thing about psilocybin mushrooms is really fascinating... but this post is too long to add any more. You guys know what my next post is going to be on now!!!)

--------------------------------------------------------------------

There you have it. Fungi are cool. They take lives, they save lives, and they made life possible, bringing it from simple algae to the complex diversity we have today.

I think I've taken a lichen to them. :P

AMAZING DOCUMENTARY

Check out this amazing documentary about our local marine ecosystems! It was all filmed without scuba tanks which is insanely impressive. Really cool to have such a diverse ecosystem just offshore!

Crime and Neuroscience

According to a study done in 2013 by Eyal Aharoni et al., it may be possible to predict if a person will commit a crime based on brain scans.  In the study, they found that little anterior cingulate cortex activity correlated to if a released prisoner would commit another crime.  Amazingly, they could even predict how long it would be until the second crime was committed.  The study looked at impulsive behaviors during an MRI scan.  They found that the prisoners were much more impulsive than most people and were inabile to stop an wrong action once it was started, even if they knew it was wrong.    This study was important because it implies causation between gyrus activity and crime, not just correlation.  This could eventually be used in court to decide if a prisoner should be released.


https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/you-illuminated/201304/can-we-predict-crime-using-brain-scans

-Kenna Sherman

Trippy Perspective on Life

I stumbled across this interesting kaleidoscope animation referencing the origins of life. I found interesting the minimal shapes used to create complex patterns. Much like how cells evolved into highly complex systems but are all built using similar building blocks. Animation

Iron Fertilization of the Ocean

In July 2012, businessman Russ George dumped 100,000 tons of iron into the North Pacific in an act of rogue science. His hope was that the iron would cause a bloom of photosynthetic organisms that would take up excess carbon in the atmosphere and that it would somehow help the salmon population. While this did cause a bloom, many scientists were upset because it is hard to calculate if the organisms are actually taking in a significant amount of carbon and if the possible adverse effects were worth it. Thankfully, George's experiment did not destroy the ecosystem. In order for there to be a long term effect, the area would have to be continuously fertilized. This experiment also showed that there was no benefit to the environment and could still potentially cause harm. But these findings have not stopped George from trying it again. Last year, he was pushing the Chilean government to let him dump iron off the coast to help the fisheries. His proposal has had a lot of push back from scientists and will most likely be rejected.

To learn more, read these articles:
https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2012/10/18/iron-fertilization-savior-to-climate-change-or-ocean-dumping/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocean-experiment-sparks-controversy/

Body Farm Documentary

Body Farms are a unique laboratory setting that serve the purpose of understanding how a human body decomposes under different conditions, with implications for solving murders. I found this really interesting documentary from National Geographic that interviews the founder of a body farm and explores it's many interesting uses.

Plants Defend Against Snail Spit

Like we talked about in class, plants can be at a disadvantage because, unlike animals, they can’t run away from predators. Some plants have physical properties to discourage predation. New research shows that tomatoes can detect predators and defend themselves before attack. In the study, John Orrock put snail spit near a tomato plant and found that the plants produced more lipoxygenase, a compound known to discourage herbivores from eating the plant. Evolutionarily, this is very advantageous for the tomatoes because they don’t have to waste energy making other defenses and only produce what they need.

Read More Here: https://news.wisc.edu/eavesdropping-plants-prepare-to-be-attacked/

-Kenna Sherman

Pig Brains, Human Immortality?!

A group of smart people at Yale have let the press know about their experiment involving decapitating up to 200 pigs and "restoring their circulation using a system of pumps, heaters, and bags of artificial blood warmed to body temperature." successfully to keep the organs alive for up to 36 hours. This has interesting implications in lab experiments on alive brain tissue. At the same time it rises ethical questions surrounding use of an "alive" brain- what does "alive" mean anyway, what does "dead" mean? There was no evidence suggesting the restored pig brains had conciseness, but how could we measure that? What is the difference if human brains were to be involved? A short article worth a read, the original research paper has yet to be published.
I saw another titles from an unreliable source, InfoWars,  about this same research titled, "Radical Experiment that Could Allow Humans Immortality." An easy jump, I know. 

MIT Tech Review
InfoWars

Animals in Australia

It was mentioned a few times in class that humans have introduced a lot of animals to Australia. I was curious as to which animals and how many different ones were brought over, so I did a quick Google search and came across this website that includes a few of them, along with pictures. I didn't know that there were camels in Australia! I also came across this site that includes some information on how introduced animals are managed. Rabbit Hemorrhagic Virus Disease is mentioned, which is the viral disease that was used to try to control the rabbit numbers (but was not successful).

Lotus Land Pictures!

I didn't get to process any of these yet but here's the google drive with the pictures from Lotus Land!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18yLF8Xkbv1xKvP6It-I5IhxgYurEgWnx?usp=sharing

Natural Selection in Humans!

     The Bajau people (in the Philippines/Malaysia/Indonesia) are known for their impressive ability to stay underwater for almost 13 minutes at depths of 200 feet.  In all humans, holding your breath results in blood vessel size decreasing, slowed heart rate and spleen contractions; however, most people can only stay in this state for a few minutes at most.  The Bajai people are thought to have a mutation leading to an enlarged spleen, allowing for this feat.  Other marine mammals have been found to have large spleens, adding to this theory.  Melissa Llardo, who lead the study, measured the spleen size of the Bajaus and people from the mainland, and found that the Bajau spleens were 50 percent larger than the mainland spleens.  The enlarged spleen is thought to be caused by PDE10A, a hormone that is known to effect spleen size in mice.  The Bajau rely on diving to find fish, a large portion of their diet.  Therefore, it is thought that natural selection has played a role in the enlarged spleen as people who can dive longer got more fish and were more likely to reproduce.  However, some scientists think this phenomenon could be due to training and adaptation to the environment.

Fisherman diving

read more here: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/04/bajau-sea-nomads-free-diving-spleen-science/

-Kenna Sherman

Victorian Women in Scientific Art!

Beatrix Potter was mentioned last week and, as I must always do when we talk about a scientific illustrator, I decided to look into her further. Like many wealthy and privately educated women of her time, Potter was interested in the natural world, an interest that spanned geology, archeology, entomology and mycology. Her gift was in detailed observation; she used a hand lens, photography, and eventually a microscope to see and draw as much detail as possible. She also began germinating spores and wrote a paper, now lost, called 'On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae' which she submitted to the Linnean Society in 1897.  Because the paper is lost, it is somewhat unclear what Potter's stance was on the idea that lichen was a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. Regardless of her contributions as a scientific researcher, her drawings are still a valuable resource for mycologists today because of her accuracy and  attention to detail. Here are some of her drawings!

While I was researching Potter I came across another female scientific illustrator, Margaret  Gatty. She was also a children's author but, in her spare time, she explored an interest in algae. Her drawings are also pretty cool! check them out!

Also Anna Atkins is cool https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/08/anna-atkins-algae/

Game Theory + Altruism

A cute internet game (takes about half an hour if you want to do the "free" mode for longer) that lets you play with the evolution of altruism in society and see where it takes you! The first five minutes will get you to at least try it, which I highly recommend.

Try it here. I love it so much! And we talked about altruism in class today so this is a cool way to do your own experiment!

Using Magnets to Prevent Heart Disease

When we were walking around Lotus Land there was this iron-rich rock that had a bunch of paperclips stuck to it... which made me think of how our blood is also iron-rich... which made me wonder if we can manipulate it using magnets... which made me think that if we could manipulate blood flow with magnets, things like arterial blockages or cholesterol build up could be quickly cleared up without any sort of invasive surgery!

Of course, it didn't turn out that easily, but people have tested this with a significant degree of success! It turns out blood is not ferromagnetic, which means someone couldn't just move an extremely strong magnet across someone's chest to swish around the blood and dislodge blockages. However, it is paramagnetic, meaning that blood is attracted to a magnetic field.

This in mind, researchers Tao and Huang (1) subjected blood flowing through a tube to an extremely strong magnetic field (over a million times that of Earth!). This caused red blood cells to align themselves into chains (see image to the right), flowing with the same speed and direction. They observed extremely decreased blood viscosity, a major factor in heart disease.

They launched into clinical trials (shouldn't you test this on some sort of animal model before going straight from plastic tube to human artery??), and rigged their machinery such that patients could stick a certain part of their bodies into the magnetic field apparatus (2). This bit is tricky because blood vessels flow in all directions in vivo, and the magnetic field must align with the direction of blood flow. Tao and Haung were able to create a magnetic field that was highly specific and could be applied to a large blood vessel in the right arm. 100% of patients (those with high blood pressure were chosen) were found to experience a 10-20% blood pressure decrease in 5-10 minutes. What's more the effects of the magnetic field last for hours. Tao and Huang now hope to apply their research a clinical treatment that could be used 3 or 4 times a day to keep a patient's blood pressure down. The American Heart Association is now helping these guys go through official clinical trials with the FDA.

Super rad!!!

1. Tao, R., Huang, K. (2011) Reducing blood viscosity with magnetic fields. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 84(1 Pt 1)

2. Gaal, R. (2017) Easing the Heartache with Magnetic Fields. APS Physics. 25 (5)

Animal Relationship Cartoons

Found a cool artist that makes little cartoons about animal relationships in the wild, covering all sorts of different reproductive strategies that we talked about in class. It's really cute and informative! Here are two examples, and the link will make let you see them larger. The artist is named Humon, you can also google her to see more of these



The image below discusses sneaky breeding males ;) There is a diagram of the real side-blotched lizards in the book, in chapter 51!

Beautiful Diatom Art

On Tuesday John mentioned Victorian diatom art, where artists would collect different diatom species of different shapes and arrange them in beautifully intricate patterns. This art form was popular in the Victorian era when people were fascinated by nature, and the art and sciences were usually studied together, unlike today. However, diatom artists were competitive and did not write down or share how to make these microscopic works of art, so it's very difficult to do it today and is an almost dead art form. But one modern artist, Klaus Kemp, spent 8 years figuring out the right glue formula to mount diatoms on and create similar complex arrangements like the ones from 150 years ago. Here's a very short but interesting documentary about Klaus Kemp and diatom art:

https://vimeo.com/90160649

And here's some examples of diatom art:
        

Mantis camouflaged as a Dead Leaf!

Phyllocrania paradoxa

Common name: Ghost Mantis

Considered miniature species are 1.8 to 2.0 in long. There is sexual dimorphism present as females reach 5-6cm and males smaller.  Their color ranges from various dark brown tones, that change in-between molts. Phyllocrania paradoxa have an average life span of about a year, with males on the short end of a year. Ranges across African continent and its islands, as well as south Europe. Spends time in dry areas like savanna bushes and shrub, rainforest limits, fields and gardens. 

 It is camouflaged as desiccated leaf material that would be found on ground in habitat. Their main body appears to be a crumbled-up leaf, and each of their legs seems to be fragmented leaf attached to a stem. Their eyes are almost the exact same color as molt. Phyllocrania paradoxa will tuck its fore limbs to assume a “leaf shape” and sway slowly back and forth, mimicking leaf in the wind. Oothecae hatch up to 36 young and they are already camouflaged as ants. Males are less camouflaged. Wings are present in adult from of both sexes with pigmented coloration to mimic veination of a leaf. They have very successful camouflage from their predators of birds or other small vertebrates.  

Sources

“Ghost Mantis – Phyllocrania paradoxa.” Keeping Insects. Keepinginsects.com, n.d. Web. 23 June2015. http://www.keepinginsects.com/praying-mantis/species/phyllocrania-paradoxa/

Tomasinelli, Francesco, and Andrea Mangoni. “Biology and Captive Breeding of the African Dead Leaf Mantis Phyllocrania Paradoxa.” Mantis Study Group Newsletter 23 (Feb. 2002): 1-12. http://mantodea.myspecies.info/sites/mantodea.myspecies.info/files/MSG%20NL%2023%20%28February%202002%2

“Spectral Leaf- Ghost Mantis, Creaturefact. 30 June 2015 https://creaturefacts.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/spectral-leaf-ghost-mantis/

“Phyllocrania Paradoxa.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Apr. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllocrania_paradoxa.